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Yankees' Duncan Promoted Because of Numbers, Not Name

Shelley Duncan has been to the World Series four times, took batting practice on the field at Yankee Stadium before he was 15 years old, and has been mentored by a man with 583 career home runs.

If any rookie should have strolled into the home clubhouse in the Bronx yesterday with a swagger, it was Duncan. The difference this time was that Duncan was not a guest of his father or brother. For the first time in his life, he was there as a player.

“This is the biggest moment of my life,” Duncan said at his locker by the clubhouse door. He batted ninth and started at designated hitter for the Yankees, going 1 for 4 with two strikeouts and a run-scoring single.

The single came in the eighth. Duncan fanned with two runners on in the second and fourth, and grounded out in the seventh. He admitted to feeling nervous his first time up.

“I came up in a big situation and I tried to slow myself down, breathe, focus,” Duncan said. “I guess I just let my adrenaline get the best of me.”

Duncan, 27, is the son of the St. Louis Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan and the brother of Cardinals outfielder Chris Duncan. As a child, he tagged along with his father’s teams and became close with the slugger Mark McGwire, spending a week with McGwire in California last October.

“It was funny, I went out there thinking we were going to hit,” Duncan said of his visit with McGwire. “It wasn’t really. It was all mental stuff. That’s how he’s always been his whole career. He was so strong mentally, and that’s what made him such a great hitter.

“I’ve talked to a lot of successful people around the game, and that’s what they all have in common: they stay focused every single day.”

Mark Newman, the Yankees’ senior vice president for player personnel, said Duncan had improved by getting smarter as a hitter. He uses the whole field now, Newman said, and is less prone to chasing pitches up in the strike zone.

“He’s a big power guy and he works very, very hard,” Newman said. “He deserves a shot.”

Duncan’s surge has been sudden, considering that the Yankees have never invited him to major league camp, despite drafting him in the second round in 2001. Duncan was considered a below-average defensive player who struck out too much (he has 661 strikeouts in 722 career games).

For Scranton this season, Duncan had 82 strikeouts in 336 at-bats. But the more important numbers were his average (.295), his homers (25), and his runs batted in (79).

“I always knew he was a strong kid and had some pop, but this year he turned a corner,” said the veteran reliever Ron Villone, who started the season with Scranton. “He was a man playing down there, stepping up to the plate and having people worry about what he was going to do. You see that, the way he changed the game for the other team, and you knew he deserved a chance.”

Manager Joe Torre said Duncan has the chance because the Yankees wanted to give the struggling Johnny Damon some time off. But when Melky Cabrera had a slight muscle pull to his left side in Thursday’s game, Damon played anyway.

Duncan, who plays first base and the corner outfield positions, said he was speechless when Scranton Manager Dave Miley told him of his promotion after a game in Indianapolis on Thursday night.

Duncan said he called his father, who checks the Scranton box score every night and was already happy to see that Shelley had homered. But the son had a surprise for the father.

“I called him and I said: ‘You must be really happy tonight. Two hits, a two-run homer and you got hit by a pitch,’ ” Dave Duncan told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch yesterday. “And he said, ‘Yeah, I am happy, but not because of that.’ I said, ‘Well, what are you happy about?’ And he said, ‘I just got called up.’